By Calvin Palmer
A school building collapsed today in Haiti killing at least 30 people and injuring dozens of others.
More schoolchildren are believed to be buried in the rubble and rescuers are using their bare hands to try and get them out.
The second floor of the three-story La Promesse School in Petionville, in the hilly suburbs of Port-au-Prince, inexplicably collapsed this morning.
Matt Marek, the head of programs for the American Red Cross in Haiti, said he thought the death toll will go much higher.
That sentiment was echoed by International Red Cross Alex Claudon who said; “We don’t have the number of victims yet but it could be very high.”
The school, which has kindergarten facilities through to high school, had 500 pupils. The Mayor of Petionville, Claire Rudie Parent, said she didn’t know how many pupils were in the school when it collapsed.
Parent said she suspected a structural defect caused the second story of the school to collapse on to the first. She doubted that recent rains had contributed to the collapse.
United Nations peacekeepers and Haitian police tried to clear a path through the crowd of onlookers who had gathered so that three battalions of military engineers from Brazil, Chile and Ecuador could assist in the rescue.
Volunteers also arrived armed with shovels and pick-axes and said they were going to try to deliver water to anybody who was trapped under the rubble.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has been struggling from a year that has brought widespread rioting over food prices and a series of hurricanes and tropical storms that claimed the lives of 800 people.
[Based on reports by the Associated Press and AFP news agencies.]
